The old internet was the peak.

Mostly static Web pages and thousands of BBS forums was the greatest.

Countries like China, Germany, Taiwan, etc. have competitive exports because they have direct and indirect subsidies to their manufacturing sectors at the expense of their household sector.

Some of these subsidies include a weak currency relative to their economy, weakened labour laws, preferential interest rates, capital controls, labour movement restrictions, etc.

China uses all of these. Germany primarily used the Hartz “reforms” which basically decoupled wage growth from productivity and GDP growth.

The reduces the household share of national income and they cannot afford to consume the production of their manufacturing sector and therefore the excess production must be exported.

I think 90% of the AI investments really have no commercial viability and are being developed to suck up clueless venture capital.

I’m older than 30.

Probably played one of your games.

Super curious here.

What game did you make?

Don’t you mean, pigboy Huffman?

You have selectively chosen parts of my post and declared victory.

This is insane, USA has a 100% tariff on Chinese cars, nobody has higher barrier to entry than USA. Germany has very low barrier, with EU only recently introducing a 15-35% import tax.

It’s true, United States has a 100% tariff on electric cars. This is a relatively recent development.

China has capital controls (which btw, Western countries could do with), a controlled exchange rate, requirements for technology transfer, etc. for decades. This is a barrier to entry for foreign competition.

I don’t have a particular issue with this given many other countries have done exactly the same thing to industrialise quickly.

You deliberately excluded all my points about indirect transfers like a controlled exchange rate, weak labour laws, preferential lending to industrial enterprises, etc.

You only have to look at the household share of national income for China compared to other countries to see how low it is and the impact of these policies (which sits at 50.7%)

OK where? This one?: https://publikationen.bundesbank.de/publikationen-en/reports-studies/monthly-reports/monthly-report-october-2024-938956?article=wage-developments-in-germany-current-situation-comparison-with-the-euro-area-and-outlook-939710

This entire article appears to be focusing on the impacts of COVID-19 and the impacts of the war in Ukraine.

In reality, Germany wages decoupled (like the United States) from GDP growth years ago.

German wage share of GDP plummeted from ~60% in 2001 to 50-52% in 2018.

Oh please, Germany has stimulated trade of Electric cars tremendously for years, but is slowing down now, because the need for subsidies isn’t as big anymore. And when Germany did that, it was equal and nondiscriminatory for all, no matter which country the car was made, the sale of it was subsidized by government.

This has no relevance to what I’m saying. Countries that run persistent trade surpluses do it by decreasing their household share of national income by direct and indirect transfers to their manufacturing industries. As a result, the household sector cannot consume what is being produced and the surplus must be exported.

While production in China has grown rapidly, it didn’t just start producing an extra 15 - 20 million cars for export. It’s own domestic demand couldn’t absorb that level of production.

You are not even debating based on reality.

You are not debating on what is even being argued.

China has more than direct subsidies to it’s manufacturing sector.

• It has a managed currency which transfers income from importers (generally households) to exporters.

• Low interest rates for heavy industries (to the point it was negative real interest for years) which is a transfer from households to the industrial sector.

• Weak labour laws which transfers income from workers to businesses.

• Etc.

The cumulative effect is a net transfer of income from the household sector to the export sector (this needs to be coupled with government policies which force these companies to invest in manufacturing capacity).

If you look at China’s household share of income, it is one of the lowest of any industrial economy and extremely low historically.

It’s household sector cannot consume what the country produces. It must export the surplus.

It relies on trade partners who are willing to run deficits without China importing an equivalent amount of their goods (since their household sector does not have the ability to consume an equivalent amount).

This particular approach is not unique to China. The Soviet Union, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Germany, United States (prior to the great depression), Brazil (during the 1960s), etc. have all followed this approach to industrial development.

It has been extremely successful but it is not sustainable. All the previous countries that used this model have run into issues that resulted in a crash (America with the great depression) or a long period of low growth (Japan) which rebalances the economy.

Germany follows the same model.

It isn’t unique to China.

Increase your savings rate (anything that isn’t consumed is saved by definition) by suppressing your household consumption through policies to “increase labour flexibility” (reduce the worker share of income)(1), have a relatively weak currency (this is a fundamental problem with the Euro where it is overvalued for countries like Greece and undervalued for countries like Germany), cut taxes on the rich (the rich tend to save far more), etc.

(1) If you look at a graph of German wages vs GDP growth, it decoupled after the “Hartz” reforms.

This results in weak domestic demand and trade surpluses that must be absorbed by other countries.

China developed dominance in this market through extensive subsidies (direct and indirect) and barriers to foreign importers.

Many countries have done this in the past (United States included), so their complaints fall rather flat.

However, I’m curious how long this will last. Excess production, weak domestic demand and trade partners being unwilling to absorb trade deficits are not sustainable.

The problem is that in a closed economy, an increase in production without increased consumption will result in over production and closed down factories.

It isn’t in capitalist’s long term interests to increase production and cut wages across an entire economy. Having a very high net savings rate (whatever you don’t consume is by definition, savings) is not a good thing as a country.

America’s early growth was based on being a high wage and high consumption country.

However, in an open economy, you can export your excess savings (and underconsumption) to other countries. This was an issue during the great depression (called “beggar thy neighbour”).

It is a big problem in the global economy right now with China, Taiwan, Korea, Germany, Denmark, etc. all having stagnant or low consumption shares of the economy while exporting their net savings to persistant trade deficit countries like the United States, UK, Australia and Canada (noting Australia and Canada sometimes have surpluses when commodity prices are high).

It relies on the net deficit countries being willing to accept net capital inflows and all the issues with having persistent trade deficits (deindustrialisation, high debts, etc.) forever, which isn’t possible.

So in short, increasing profits and cutting wages (and/or the overall workforce) might work for an individual greedy douchebag but it is a terrible thing for the entire economy.

Yeah, the constant negative circlejerking on Lemmy is getting pretty tiresome.

More competition is better.

Outside Musk subs like /r/elonmusk, /r/Tesla and /r/spacex, Elon is widely mocked across reddit.

Reddit is a shithole but let’s be real here.

It’s like he was having a stroke while typing that up.

The far-left to far-right pipeline is wild.

It’s like they had no ideological consistency in the first place.

I always liked reddit better since people actually discussed real things.

😂

I was on there for 10 years and it has been nothing but a massive circlejerk for the majority of the subs with obvious bots and astrosurfing.

4 million households in Australia have solar panels.

They are great value.

Enshittenification

Lemmy like Reddit is a circlejerk.

Bernie lost because less people voted for him.

If it wasn’t for the undemocratic caucuses, he would have lost earlier.

Windows 3.1 was the first one my family had.